Guys,
Listen, you know how much I love rocking with you. I think we've made some really amazing music together over the years and played some truly awesome shows. I absolutely love being a member of OK Go.
But look, I'm just not sure how much more I can take. Over the past eighteen months I have spent perhaps 5% of my time playing the actual keyboards. And how do I spend the rest of my time? Choreography. Hours and hours of painstaking, intricate, avant-garde choreography. Weeks spent in cold, bleak rehearsal rooms being yelled at by a elderly Russian lady in leg-warmers who prods me with a stick because my arm movements aren't dynamic enough. Days spent upside down in a binding harness with paintballs being fired at me. Hours spent learning how to use an aqualung so I can play underwater while dressed as a crab.
At first I thought our commitment to creating unusual, amusing videos was really neat. But slowly it has become the sole purpose of my existence, engulfing everything else like some vast, multi-colored swamp. I don't know what I am anymore.
And then there's the pressure. The crushing, devastating pressure of not fucking up. The pressure of knowing that if I place my foot an inch or two out of line, blink my eyes incorrectly or fail to have the same blank expression as the rest of the band, then a whole days filming is lost. Millions of dollars wasted. Doomed to repeat the same painful spins again and again, terrified of error. No end in sight. The biological noise that a frustrated film crew makes when you mess up and destroy a take is not something I ever want to hear again. The looks on their faces. The pure, savage anger. It haunts my dreams. Can we maybe move onto videos with two shots? Or even more?
I just wanted to play keyboards in an infectious indie pop band. Weezer doesn't have this pressure. I know, I've asked Weezer. Weezer are happy. They play shows and make records. Their videos are unambitious. They don't have calf muscles that are, according to my leg specialist, ' bear the ropey mass usually seen on a retired linebacker'. In fact, I doubt anyone in Weezer even needs a leg specialist. Because their videos don't involve them jerkily jigging around miniature versions of famous landmarks made from butter which slowly melt around you for 17 hours straight.
I don't sleep anymore. I have a perpetual skin rash. My IBS has been described as 'clinically interesting'. I have a permanent scar from an over-heating treadmill. How many keyboard players can claim that? Though I'm not a keyboard player. I'm a husk.
You remember when we started? Driving from town to town? Playing for beer? Sleeping on couches? I just spent the past four weeks learning how to drive a Segway through a giant replica of the board game Mousetrap while bouncing a ping pong ball on a bat. I can't remember the last time I heard laughter. All I hear are the bitter screams of my own drummer because I can't dance in formation through a shopping mall while wearing a CGI leotard. This is not what I was expecting when I joined this band.
I hate music now. You have made me hate music. Every time I approach my synthesizer my throat closes over and there isn't a fetal position tight enough to console me. I have the hips of a 70 year-old rodeo veteran. I have so many complicated dance routines stuck in my brain, I can't remember the names of my children, who I now look on with utter disdain as I have delivered them into a world where their father inches his way through the streets of Tokyo in a crash helmet with sand being poured on him.
I should let you know, The Rentals have been in touch. I am considering their offer. They don't dress their keyboard players as dandelion strands and blow them over the Hoover Dam at midnight in order to sell records.
Andy
(Keyboards)
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